Last year, while I was serving with Americorps, I attended a team-building exercise run by the staff of Project Homecoming. One of the workshop leaders recited the following passage:
“If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.
Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.
Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.
Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.
I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.
I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right – for me.
To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differeces from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.”
-Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types – By David Keirsey
More can be found on David Keirsey and the Myers-Briggs personality types at David Keirsey’s website.
This passage had an immediate and profound impact on me. During times when I find myself slipping out of balance, I like to remind myself of this quote. I have revisited it often and have found that it still holds the power to help me regain the focus that I momentarily lose.
